Absolution Gap (56 page)

Something snapped in her then. She knelt down on the armoured trapdoor and pounded it with her fists. She wanted the Observer to come back up and make some explanation for why he had shaken his head. She wanted him to apologise, to make her feel as if she had done nothing wrong by spying on their ritual. She wanted him to purge her guilt, to take it upon himself. She wanted absolution.

She kept knocking on the door, but nothing happened. The caravan rumbled on. The racked Observers maintained their tireless scrutiny of Haldora. Finally, humbled and humiliated, feeling even more foolish than she had when the man had saved her, Rashmika stood up and went back across the roof of the machine to her own part of the caravan. Inside her helmet she cried at her own weakness, wondering why she had ever imagined she had the strength or courage to see her quest through to the end.

 

Ararat, 2675

 

“Do you believe in coincidences?” asked the swimmer.

“I don’t know,” Vasko said. He stood at a window in the High Conch, a hundred metres above the grid of night-time streets. His hands were laced neatly behind his back, his booted feet set slightly apart, his spine straight. He had heard that there was to be a meeting here, and that he would not be prevented from attending. No one had explained why it was taking place in the conch structure rather than the supposedly more secure environment of the ship.

He looked out beyond the land to the ribbon of water between the shore and the dark spire of the ship. The Juggler activity had not lessened, but there was, strangely, a swathe of calm water reaching out into the bay like a tongue. The shapes festered on either side of it, but between them the water had the smooth cast of molten metal. The moving lanterns of boats meandered away from land, navigating that strip. They were sailing in the direction of the ship, strung out in a ragged, bobbing procession. It was as if the Jugglers were giving them clear passage.

“Rumours spread fast,” the swimmer said. “You’ve heard, haven’t you?”

“About Clavain and the girl?”

“Not just that. The ship. They say it’s started to come alive again. The neutrino detectors—you know about those?” She didn’t wait for his answer. “They’re registering a surge in the engine cores. After twenty-three years, they’re warming. The ship’s thinking about leaving.”

“No one told it to.”

“No one has to. It’s got a mind of its own. Question is, are we better off being on it when it leaves, or halfway around Ararat? We know there’s a battle going on up there now, even if we didn’t all believe that woman’s story at first.”

“Not much doubt about it now,” Vasko said, “and the Jugglers seem to have made up their minds as well. They’re letting those people reach the ship. They
want
them to reach safety.”

“Maybe they just don’t want them to drown,” the swimmer said. “Maybe they’re simply humouring whatever decision we make. Maybe none of it matters to them.”

Her name was Pellerin and he knew her from the earlier meeting aboard the
Nostalgia for Infinity
. She was a tall woman with the usual swimmer’s build. She had a handsome, strong-boned face with a high brow, and her hair was slicked back and glossy with perfumed oils, as if she had just emerged from the sea. What he took at first glance to be freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose were in fact pale-green fungal markings. Swimmers had to keep an eye on those markings. They indicated that the sea was taking a liking to them, invading them, breaking down the barriers between vastly different organisms. Sooner or later, it was said, the sea would snatch them as a prize, dissolving them into the Pattern Juggler matrix.

Swimmers made much of that. They liked to play on the risks they took each time they entered the ocean, especially when they were senior swimmers like Pellerin.

“It’s quite possible they do want them to make it to safety,” Vasko said, “Why don’t you swim and find out for yourselves?”

“We never swim when it’s like this.”

Vasko laughed. “Like this? It’s
never
been like this, Pellerin.”

“We don’t swim when the Jugglers are so agitated,” she said. “They’re not predictable, like one of your scraping machines. We’ve lost swimmers before, especially when they’ve been wild, like they are now.”

“I’d have thought the circumstances outweighed the risks,” he said. “But then what do I know? I just work in the food factories.”

“If you were a swimmer, Malinin, you’d certainly know better than to swim on a night like this.”

“You’re probably right,” he said.

“Meaning what?”

He thought of the sacrifice that had been made today. The scale of that gesture was still too large for him to take in. He had begun to map it, to comprehend some of its essential vastness, but there were still moments when abysses opened before him, reaching into unsuspected depths of courage and selflessness. He did not think a lifetime would be enough to diminish what he had experienced in the iceberg.

Clavain’s death would always be there, like a piece of shrapnel buried inside him, its sharp foreign presence felt with every breath.

“Meaning,” he said, “that if I were more concerned about my own wellbeing than the security of Ararat . . . then, yes, I might have second thoughts about swimming.”

“You insolent little prick, Malinin. You have no idea.”

“You’re wrong,” he said, with sudden venom, “I have every idea. What I witnessed today is something you can thank God you didn’t have to experience. I know what it means to be brave, Pellerin. I know what it means and I wish I didn’t.”

“I heard it was Clavain who was the brave one,” she said.

“Did I say otherwise?”

“You make it sound as if it was you.”

“I was there,” he said. “That was enough.”

There was a forced calm in her voice. “I’ll forgive you this, Malinin. I know you all went though something awful out there. It must have messed with your mind pretty badly. But I’ve seen my two best friends drown before my eyes. I’ve watched another two dissolve into the sea and I’ve seen six end up in the psychiatric camp, where they spend their days drooling and scratching marks on to the walls with the blood from their fingertips. One of them was my lover. Her name is Shizuko. I visit her there now and when she looks at me she just laughs and goes back to her drawings. I have about as much personal significance for her as the weather.” Pellerin’s eyes flashed wide. “So don’t give me a lecture about bravery, all right? We’ve all seen things we’d sooner forget.”

Her calm had undermined his own furious sense of self-righteousness. He was, he realised, shaking. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Just get over it,” she said. “And never, ever tell me that we don’t have the guts to swim when you don’t know a damned thing about us.”

Pellerin left him. He stood alone, his thoughts in turmoil. He could still see the line of boats, each lantern now fractionally further out from the shoreline.

Vasko slipped an anonymous brown coat over his Security Arm uniform, descended the High Conch and walked unobserved into the night.

As he stepped outside he felt a tension in the air, like the nervous stillness that presaged an electrical storm. The crowds moved through the narrow, twisting defiles of the streets in boisterous surges. There was a macabre carnival atmosphere about the lantern-lit assembly, but no one was shouting or laughing; all that he heard was the low hum of a thousand voices, seldom raised above a normal speaking level.

He did not much blame them for their reaction. Towards the end of the afternoon there had been only one curt official statement on the matter of Clavain’s death, and it now seemed unlikely that there was any part of the colony that hadn’t heard that news. The surge of people into the streets had begun even before sundown and the arrival of the lights in the sky. Rightly, they sensed that there was something missing from the official statement. There had been no mention of Khouri or the child, no mention of the battle taking place in near-Ararat space, merely a promise that more information would be circulated in the fullness of time.

The ragtag procession of boats had begun shortly afterwards. Now there was a small braid of bobbing lights at the very base of the ship, and more boats were continually leaving the shore. Security Arm officers were doing their best to keep the boats from leaving the colony, but it was a battle they could not hope to win. The Arm had never been intended to cope with massive civil disobedience, and the best that Vasko’s colleagues could do was impede the exodus. Elsewhere, there were reports of disturbances, fires and looting, with the Arm regulars having to make arrests. The Juggler activity—whatever it signified—continued unabated.

Vasko was grateful to find himself relieved of any scheduled duties. Wandering through the crowds, his own part in the day’s events not yet revealed, he listened to the rumours that were already in circulation. The simple kernel of truth—that Clavain had been killed in an ultimately successful action to safeguard a vital colonial asset—had accreted many layers of speculation and untruth. Some of the rumours were extraordinary in their ingenuity, in the details they posited for the circumstances of the old man’s death.

Pretending ignorance, Vasko stopped little groups of people at random and asked them what was going on. He made sure no one saw his uniform and also that none of the groups contained people likely to recognise him from work or his social circles.

What he heard disgusted him. He listened earnestly to graphic descriptions of gunfights and bomb plots, subterfuge and sabotage. It amazed and appalled him to discover how easily these stories had been spun out of nothing more than the fact of Clavain’s death. It was as if the crowd itself was manifesting a sly, sick collective imagination.

Equally distressing was the eagerness of those listening to accept the stories, bolstering the accounts with their own interjected suggestions for how events had probably proceeded. Later, eavesdropping elsewhere, Vasko observed that these embellishments had been seamlessly embroidered into the main account. It did not seem to bother anyone that many of the stories were contradictory, or at best difficult to reconcile with the same set of events. More than once, with incredulity, he heard that Scorpio or some other colony senior had died alongside Clavain. The fact that some of those individuals had already appeared in public to make short, calming speeches counted for nothing. With a sinking feeling, a cavernous resignation, Vasko realised that even if he were to start recounting events exactly as they had happened, his own version would have no more immediate currency than any of the lies now doing the rounds. He hadn’t actually witnessed the death himself, so even if he told the truth of things it would still only be from his point of view, and his story would of necessity have a damning taint of second-hand reportage about it. It would be dismissed, its content unpalatable, the details too vague.

Tonight, the people wanted an unequivocal hero. By some mysterious self-organising process of story creation, that was precisely what they were going to get.

He was shouldering his way through the lantern-carrying mob when he heard his own name called out.

“Malinin.”

It took him a moment to locate the source of the voice in the crowd. A woman was standing in a little circle of stillness. The rabble flowed around her, never once violating the immediate volume of private space she had defined. She wore a long-hemmed black coat, the collar an explosion of black fur, the black peak of an unmarked cap obscuring the upper part of her face.

“Urton?” he asked, doubtfully.

“It’s me,” she said, stepping nearer to him. “I guess you got the night off as well. Why aren’t you at home resting?”

There was something in her tone that made him defensive. In her presence he still felt that he was continually being measured and found wanting.

“I could ask you the same question.”

“Because I know there wouldn’t be any point. Not after what happened out there.”

Provisionally, he decided to go along with this pretence at civility. He wondered where it was going to lead him. “I did try to sleep this afternoon,” he said, “but all I heard were screams. All I saw was blood and ice.”

“You weren’t even in there when it happened.”

“I know. So imagine what it must be like for Scorpio.”

Now that Urton was next to him he shared the same little pocket of quiet that she had defined. He wondered how she did it. He did not think it very likely that the people flowing around them had any idea who Urton was. They must have sensed something about her: an electric prickle of foreboding.

“I feel sorry for what he had to do,” Urton said.

“I’m not sure how he’s going to take it, in the long run. They were very close friends.”

“I know that.”

“It wasn’t just any old friendship,” Vasko replied. “Clavain saved Scorpio’s life once, when he was due to be executed. There was a bond between them that went right back to Chasm City. I don’t think there was anyone else on this planet that Clavain respected quite as much as Scorpio. And Scorpio also knew that. I went with him to the island where Clavain was waiting. I saw them talking together. It wasn’t the way I’d imagined it to be. They were more like two old adventurers who’d seen a lot of the same things, and knew no one else quite understood them.”

“Scorpio isn’t that old.”

“He is,” Vasko said. “For a pig, anyway.”

Urton led him through the crowd, towards the shore. The crowd began to thin out, and a warm night breeze salted with brine made his eyes tingle. Overhead, the strange lights etched arcane motifs from horizon to horizon. It was less like a firework display or aurora and more like a vast, painstaking geometry lesson.

“You’re worried it’ll have done something to him, aren’t you?” Urton asked.